Gleeful means feeling or showing great delight and joy, often in a way that's obvious to everyone around you. When you're gleeful, you're bubbling over with excitement and pleasure that you can barely contain.

Picture a child on Christmas morning tearing into presents with a huge grin, or a soccer player jumping up and down after scoring the winning goal. That visible, energetic happiness is gleeful joy. Someone might let out a gleeful laugh when they finally solve a puzzle they've been working on for hours, or do a gleeful dance when they hear school is canceled due to snow.

The word often suggests playfulness and uninhibited celebration. While someone might feel quiet contentment reading a good book, they'd feel gleeful triumph when beating their older sibling at chess for the first time. A gleeful person expresses their happiness fully and openly, holding nothing back, and their glee (the noun form) can feel contagious to everyone nearby.

You can be gleeful about your own good fortune or gleeful about something you're watching happen. Sometimes people even feel gleeful about mischief, like when planning a harmless prank on April Fool's Day.